With 200 million members worldwide and two new members joining every second, it’s important to have a credible presence on LinkedIn, it’s often the most effective social media channel for B2B. It’s a mini search engine in its own right; people can find you by doing a company search, but more importantly, as LinkedIn is more about personal connections, people will find your business through your profile and your colleagues’.
LinkedIn has also added new features for company pages since September, making them a more effective and trackable marketing channel especially in terms of your product / service awareness and sales promotions.
Before I continue, I hold my hands up and admit that for the Artlab it’s been a case of ‘the cobbler’s children have no shoes’ with our own LinkedIn company page.
We’ve made a start while we finalise our marketing strategy and website so I’d like to pass on some of the basic actions you can take today and give you some tips for ongoing activities.
1. If you don’t have a company page on LinkedIn you can create one easily by visiting the Companies tab and clicking on ‘Add a Company’
2. Once the company page is set up, you can start adding content by clicking on the ‘Edit’ button
3. Starting with the Overview tab:
Here you can:
- Specify who will be able to edit and update your page by choosing ‘Designated Admins’
- Enter company information such as address, web url and so on
- Add a visually striking image and logos, making sure they’re high quality; the size and formats required are specified when you click on ‘+Add image’ and ‘+Add logo’
- Enter your company description – a good place for a short sales pitch about your company, products/services and USPs
- You will need to click the ‘Publish’ button at the top right of the page to save changes
4. Moving on to the Services tab, you can add services by hovering on the white arrow so that a drop down menu appears
5. The services pages offer a wide range of ways of promoting your service, from links to specific service pages on your company website to highlighting features and benefits, to videos and special offers
Why not invite customers to recommend your services? These ‘word of mouth’ recommendations are valuable as they carry credibility and will be seen by your customers’ networks, helping widen awareness of your company and services.
So your company page is now set up. You can ask contacts to follow your page and use the updates function in the same way you would post on Twitter or facebook:
For example you could post about:
- Company updates, events & meetings
- Case studies
- New products / services launches
- Special offers
- Blog posts
- Videos, webinars, guides
- Relevant news items
You can also choose who you share your updates with; this means they can be highly targeted to specific types of followers.
One last feature which is very useful is in the Insights tab, where you can access:
- Follower insights showing company update engagement, follower demographics, recent users, new followers, and member growth
- Page Insights showing page visitor demographics, page views and unique visitors by tab, and how many clicks you’ve received on your Services page
I hope this quick overview gave you a better feel of how you could better use your LinkedIn account to promote your company and services. If you have any questions or want more information on how we can help your business with digital marketing just get in touch on 0161 875 2528.